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Daphne Zuniga first proper starring role, Larry Stewart’s 1984 slasher picture The Initiation opens with a prologue where a young girl named Kelly walks in on her mother, Frances (Vera Miles), while
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Written and directed by the late, great David E. Durston, 1971’s I Drink Your Blood opens with an ominous scene in which a man named Horace Bones (Bhaskar) leads a cult of acid dropping hippies in a Satanic ritual out in the woods. After they all get naked and listen to a bizarre sermon in which Bones tells them ‘Satan was an acid head’ they realize they’re being watch by a young woman. Even though she was invited by one of their own, Horace is none too pleased and so he sends two of his minions off to chase her through the woods and rape her!

For those of us that grew up with film in the 70's, 80's, and even 90's, the teen sex comedy is not a new thing. Largely owing to 1978's Animal House, the barrage of films that followed were largely
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Directed by Rick Sloane in 1988, Hobgoblins will forever live in infamy thanks to a fairly ruthless skewering it received on Mystery Science Theater 3000. For those unfamiliar with the film, it begins at an old unused movie studio. Here an aging security
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Story time. Somewhere around 1984, when our family was somewhat broke, our outside entertainment came in the form of video rentals. Once a month, we headed off to National Video to rent a padded bag with a
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The second feature film directed by Richard Casey, 1988’s Hellbent tells the ‘story’ of a man named Lemmy (Phil Ward). He’s a rocker, and he and his rocker pals make up a punk band called The Mynde
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While iconic filmmaker Herschell Gordon Lewis, the Godfather Of Gore, may have recently shuffled off this mortal coil, his legacy lives on and nowhere is that more apparent than in Arrow Video’s massive retrospective boxed set release, The Herschell Gordon Lewis Feast. Collecting fourteen of the man’s cinematic efforts spread across fourteen discs (two films on each Blu-ray disc and then those same two films on each DVD in the set – this is a combo pack release), this type of treatment to a fringe cult icon like Lewis is almost unprecedented.

The movies that make up The Herschell Gordon Lewis Feast are:

DISC ONE/TWO:

Blood Feast:

“Nothing to appalling in the annals of horror!”

After a great opening credits sequence in which blood spells out the movie title over an image of the Sphinx, we meet Mrs. Dorothy Fremont (Lyn Bolton), a very proper woman who wants to throw a party for her daughter, Suzette (Playboy Playmate Connie Mason). She hires a caterer named Fuad Ramses (Mal Arnold) after he sells her on the idea of an Egyptian feast. As Fuad goes about preparing the meal, local ladies start disappearing and a pair of cops - Frank (Scott H. Hall) and Detective Pete Thornton (William Kerwin, credited as Thomas Wood) make the scene and try to figure out who has been killing these women and why. Yet all the while, Ramses prepares his feast... and his sacrifice to Ishtar!

Fairly awful in terms of acting and direction, Blood Feast nevertheless delivers exactly what it promises. Insanely gory even by modern standards, this one knocked the socks off of sixties era theater goers and before you know it, this twenty-five thousand dollar production had cleared a few million in box office returns. Ever the promoter, producer Friedman came up with novelty barf-bags to hand out at theaters and even went so far as to bring nurses to screenings to help out in case people fainted. These wacky exploitation tactics worked wonders and the film made a killing in spite of the fact that it's really pretty terrible.

As terrible as it is, however, it's hard for any self-respecting horror buff or drive-in fan not to have a good time with this one. Mal Arnold, who Lewis would later use in Goldilocks And The Three Bares and Scum Of The Earth is perfect as Fuad, delivering his lines with complete conviction and delivering one of the most thrilling gimp legged chase scenes through the suburbs of Miami you're ever likely to see. Connie Mason isn't much of an actress but she looks great here and handles her role just fine. Her relationship with Kerwin might not ever go down in the books are a romance for the ages but they make for a likeable enough pair. It's the gore effects though, that combined with Arnold's flat out weird lead role, that keep people coming back to this one. It's silly, splashy, gooey, gory and fun - sure it looks as cheap as it was and it's goofy as goofy can be but it never overstays its seventy minute running time and it's nothing if not entertaining, albeit sometimes for all the wrong reasons. Lewis would follow this up with a sequel, Blood Feast 2: All You Can Eat in 2002.

Richard Casey’s Horror House On Highway 5 opens with a scene in which a maniac in a Richard Nixon mask lays bloody siege to a suburban home, killing some guy and then shaking his girlfriend who then… commits
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As Danny freakin' Kaye once lamented, "One and all keep us guessing what the heck they're expressing, instead of dance it's choreography!", and let me tell you, as 1943's Busby Berkeley film opens, I found myself wondering the
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Letters of a Portuguese Nun (notice the lack of the word Love) were first published in Paris in 1669; believed to be true, they became a written sensation. For years, they were attributed to a Portuguese nun who allegedly wrote them to her lover, a Parisian
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Directed by Joseph Losey in 1966, pretty much the height of the swinging spy movie craze, Modesty Blaise stars the strikingly beautiful Monica Vitti as the titular secret agent in the employ of the British
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Directed by Fred Zinneman and released to theaters in 1952, High Noon is set in Hadleyville, New Mexico and tells the story of Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) who we meet just as he is about to marry
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